These are just some of foreign surgeons who will join the No Needle NSV Mission in Cebu & Manila early next year 2012
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Foreign surgeons to join the No Needle NSV Mission in Cebu & Manila
These are just some of foreign surgeons who will join the No Needle NSV Mission in Cebu & Manila early next year 2012
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Responsible Parenthood
Posted on November 08, 2011 09:21:38 PM
Responsible parenthood
I do not see population explosion as the core issue on the RH bill. Countries with large populations, such as China and India, are surging ahead as emerging world economic powers. In the Eastern European countries, the unfavorable dependency ratio or overly slow population growth, is threatening the survival of seniors, whose pension and health plans cannot be properly covered by the inadequate contributions from the younger generation.
My own view is that the core issue on the RH bill is that of enabling a Filipino family to live within its size and means, to the end that it is able to provide a good quality of life for its desired family size.
There is no need to debate that in fact, most of our families are unable to provide adequately for a better life for its members, in terms of education, proper nutrition, shelter, and good health. These are the basics that they need to provide, in order that the next generation may have broader options in opportunities for the kind of life they would prefer to have. Surveys have shown that the Filipino couple prefers to have fewer children than they already have.
When a couple does not plan the size of their family, and does not, or is unable to ensure that their goals are met, they are acting irresponsibly, or are deprived of true freedom for themselves, and especially for their descendants.
There is a time for everything. At this time in our country, we are not able to provide enough jobs, and enough social services to enable the large majority of our families to obtain proper schooling, easy access to quality health care, decent housing, and proper nutrition. The percentage of families that suffer involuntary hunger is shamefully large. Because of irresponsible use or misuse of our natural, economic and fiscal resources by previous generations, we have to run in order to stay in place. There is so much catching up to do.
Meanwhile, all the stakeholders, the Filipino families, the government, and social institutions including the religious must work together to ensure that until we are able to provide adequately for present and future needs of our families, we must educate young couples and enable them to effectively determine the size of the families that they will responsibly bring into this world.
As the President has said, we must inform and educate couples on how they can do this; and help provide those who are unable to obtain the means with which to freely and effectively determine the size of their families with the means. This way, we ease the burden for responsible parenthood on both the family and the state.
The Catholic Church has no business interfering in the government’s work of enabling families to take better care of their own, by enabling them to procreate and live within their means. There is enough evidence that natural family planning methods are ineffective in most cases. Celibates have no idea how difficult these are to implement effectively. And it is not true, as pro-life advocates have been claiming, that the pill causes abortion. This campaign has gone too far and is irresponsible. The authority on this matter should be obstetrician-gynecologists and scientists who are experts on human fertility matters, not morality ideologues.
As our country is able to catch up and provide enough of the social service needs of our people, and as urbanization and better education enable couples to effectively determine the size of their families, there will be less need for laws to be enacted just for the government to be able to provide family planning education and methods to help the poor. They will be able to help themselves. And there will be less of them.
Meanwhile, unless we pass the RH bill now, most of our families will continue to be deprived of adequate food, health care, housing, and education. And the Philippines will continue to be a nation unable to provide its people with their basic freedoms: from hunger, from ignorance, from disease, and from stunted development of their human potential. We will continue to see hungry, ill-clad, and dirty children walking the streets at night, sleeping on pavements, because their parents were not prepared to have them. We will continue to have landless rural poor cutting young trees in the forests and destroying mangroves and our sustainable environment, in order to turn them into marketable charcoal. This is cruel, irresponsible, and un-Christian; and we cannot continue to allow it. Ladies and gentlemen of Congress, we must pass the RH bill now!
Grassroots & Governance
By Teresa S. Abesamis
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